“Provocative” is one of those publishing buzzwords reflexively used to stir up interest in the most banal of books. Next month, however, a work of fiction lands in Canada for which the overused descriptor is tepid. The book is Wetlands, a translation of Feuchtgebiete, written by 30-year-old German TV personality Charlotte Roche. The novel, which has sold some 1.5 million copies in Germany and became the first German work of fiction to top Amazon.com’s global chart, has caused a major Teutonic commotion since its publication last February, so much so that smelling salts have become necessary at Roche’s public readings due to people fainting. Just what’s most shocking about the novel is up for debate: is it the defiant shamelessness with which its troubled 18-year-old narrator, Helen Memel, who’s recovering in hospital from surgery to remove an infected hemorrhoid, boldly charts her bodily secretions and sexuality? (“I use my smegma the way others use their vials of perfume,” she claims.) Or is it that the novel’s utterly original, occasionally stomach-churning imagery was written by a woman who resembles a young Audrey Hepburn?

The British-born Roche, speaking on the telephone from Cologne, says her smegmatic tour de force came easily, once she decided on the subject. “Those are my topics,” she says. “I enjoy talking about them, even when I’m embarrassed. If I cut myself shaving, I’d show everybody, even if I think it looks ugly.” She’d been wrestling with what to write about after signing a book contract and spending the advance: “For seven years I had a bad conscience,” she says. “The idea started with writing about the secret embarrassing things I do on the toilet and even the things I hide from my husband—just getting the secrets inside out.” She and her protagonist share some biographical details: both are children of divorce; Roche too was a wild child who dropped out of school in Grade 11, formed a female garage rock band, cut herself to paint with blood, experimented with drugs and shaved her head before getting a job as a video jockey on Viva, the German MTV. The author is amused by the extent to which the media have identified her with her character. “They’re always sniffing around me, to see if I’m dirty like Helen,” she says.

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